Nathaniel Mary Quinn on

A Raisin in the Sun

Director: Daniel Petrie

1961 / 128min / DCP

Hansberry’s play, the first by a Black woman to be performed on Broadway, came to the screen two years later in this sterling adaptation featuring the original cast—Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Claudia McNeil, and Diana Sands—reprising their roles as the members of the Younger family, living on hope of an incoming insurance policy payout and quarreling over how to spend it in their much-too-small Chicago apartment. A landmark film that introduced a new generation of Black screen talent—Louis Gossett Jr. and Ivan Dixon are on-hand as well—in a vehicle that dealt candidly and eloquently with the travails of the Black family in midcentury America, and the rancor born of dreams deferred.

“Years ago, when I was a teacher at a grammar school in Chicago after completing graduate school at New York University, I painted a mural in one of the classrooms, staying up all night to complete it, and watched A Raisin in the Sun about 15 times—I could not get enough of it; one of the best films I have ever seen.” —Nathaniel Mary Quinn

Pre-screening conversation with artist Nathaniel Mary Quinn and writer and filmmaker Donna Augustin-Quinn on Friday, September 27th.